Well the government has shut down and DC will draw to a stand still……but the weather NEVER stops…….
The last week it has been colder than a witch’s tit in a brass bra…..even as far South as the Gulf Coast had snow, sleet and a week of below freezing temps….but with all the cold in 2018……but Moscow is the coldest…….
If Russian winters weren’t miserable and dreary, we wouldn’t have Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. In fact, the month of December 2000 saw just three hours of sunlight in Moscow, the New York Times reports. That benchmark was just shattered, however, with Moscow experiencing its “darkest December” ever, the paper notes, soaking in a whole six minutes of sun over all of last month. The average for December in the country’s capital is 18 hours. This followed an atypically wet and chilly summer, which prompted more than the usual number of calls to local mental health services and visits to psychiatrists. “When they hear about this, many people say, ‘It’s clear now why I was depressed,'” Roman Vilfand, the head of Russia’s weather service, says. Vilfand notes the bleakness was brought about by warm air masses sweeping in from the Atlantic and saturating the sky with clouds.
The lack of sunlight isn’t the only issue now that it’s winter. With the darkness comes extreme cold, with temperatures throughout Russia plummeting into deep-freeze territory. In Yakutsk (also spelled Yakutia), generally considered to be the country’s coldest area, temps have hovered at around minus 80 degrees Fahrenheit, the BBC reports. The Siberian Times notes it was so cold in Oymyakon, sometimes dubbed the coldest village in the world, that a new, recently installed electronic thermometer actually broke. To underscore the brutal weather, one local Yakutskian posted a picture of herself on Instagram showing her bundled up, her eyelashes crusted with ice. “This is nothing but a trip to work in [-52],” she posted. “Now, every girl in Yakutsk has a photo like this.” (It’s approaching Antarctic levels there.)
2017 has been one of the hottest on record…..
Earth last year wasn’t quite as hot as 2016’s record-shattering mark, but it ranked second or third, depending on who was counting. Either way, scientists say it showed a clear signal of man-made global warming because it was the hottest year they’ve seen without an El Nino boosting temperatures naturally. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the United Kingdom’s meteorological office on Thursday announced that 2017 was the third hottest year on record. At the same time, NASA and researchers from a nonprofit in Berkeley, California, called it the second. The agencies slightly differ because of how much they count an overheating Arctic, where there are gaps in the data. The global average temperature in 2017 was 58.51 degrees, which is 1.51 degrees above the 20th century average and just behind 2016 and 2015, NOAA said.
During an El Nino year—when a warming of the central Pacific changes weather worldwide—the globe’s annual temperature can spike, naturally, by a tenth or two of a degree, scientists said. There was a strong El Nino during 2015 and 2016. But 2017 finished with a La Nina, the cousin of El Nino that lowers temperatures, reports the AP. Had there been no man-made warming, 2017 would have been average or slightly cooler than normal, said National Center for Atmospheric Research climate scientist Ben Sanderson. The observed warming has been predicted within a few tenths of a degree in computer simulations going back to the 1970s and 1980s, several scientists said. It has been 33 years since the last month that the globe was cooler than normal, according to NOAA.
Have a good day….keep warm